The Dreamscape Called America

I had a dream once. 7:30 A.M., I was drifting off and ended up in a land of dreams in which i soon became a student accepted to Harvard University. As the soon to be freshman hockey player with a full-ride scholarship to a top university in the country, fame in high school came easily..... Then i woke up. In doing so, I realized that I am nowhere close to achieving that dream. My life is not horrible, but it is not at the caliper of this dream i had. This fake reality that is achieved through dreams blinds Walter. He cannot see past his hopes of owning a liquor store and becoming rich quick, which causes him to quarrel with his family members. Walter must come back to reality, otherwise he may end up destroying his relationships with those close to him. Trying to make our own personal dreams come true can be extremely selfish and cause more turmoil than good.

What Makes a Good Story

While reading and analyzing F. Scott Fitzgerald's pieces, we try to pick out his motives and self-connections in the novels and short stories. However, did he actually try to make these connections while writing these pieces, or was he just expressing his feelings? What if these "great American stories" really weren't meant to show a piece of the author's life or to symbolize the bad aspects of a time period. Maybe Gatsby just liked bright colors, so he bought a yellow car just because. Nick could have just been an artsy guy, and that is why he always described Gatsby's wardrobe choice so deliberately. All these different parts of literature that we pick apart in class could just be random and have no deeper meaning like everything has to have apparently. Maybe just reading a book for the enjoyment of the story and not to discover a deeper meaning is what the author really wanted his audience to get out of his/her piece.

The OPTICal Illusion

While analyzing the cover art for The Great Gatsby, we used the method of OPTIC. I never really expected to get so much meaning out of a simple picture, but the amount of possible meanings and in depth symbols that are hidden in the cover is astounding. These tools of analysis help to lead the user in finding out what these deeper meanings are. They help to uncover the optical allusion (puns are fun) that abstract pieces, such as Gatsby's cover, contain. All of this shows the value simple things can have. A picture really can mean a thousand words or even more. Learning tools really do help guide our way into finding the true meanings of pieces and develop our ways of thinking. All of this revelation of inside worth actually relates back to Gatsby and his mysteriousness as well. This could mean that the novel along with the cover try to show that all things, good and bad, can be looked at in more ways than one and are meant to be looked at that way.